In Girling, her open-hearted debut collection, Eve Esfandiari-Denney wrestles with the boundaries between living and death, history and the present, and how these are preordained for us in the fabric of our DNA and in our geographical or cultural environments. Through a personal relationship with illness and a closeness to death, the author asks the reader, ‘I hope it’s ok to die. I can / be something / like actualized metaphor.’ She recounts the story of a father left abandoned in a church, and remembers a grandmother’s home in a traveller’s caravan. Grief is portrayed with a tongue in cheek, cosmic register, as the speaker invests in ‘lions’ mane’, attempts to feel ‘super-radiant’, and moves into ‘moon pose’, while we watch electronic deep-sea claws on YouTube, and google what to do if your mum died last night. Philosophical, funny, pertinent, ecological, global and intimate, this is a collection of poems for the contemporary moment, a book deeply personal yet communal in its intention, beginning from a personal history then resonating outwards, ending on a note so gorgeously hopeful, as ‘life’ moves towards the speaker, ‘gloriously close’.
Girling
French paperback with flaps, 104 pages
Published 10 September
Girling
on Behalf of Proximity to Mammal
It’s the evening after my shift and I’m on the sofa curling into moon
pose, pulling whoever’s Ocean close and over me. When I say who-
ever’s Ocean, I mean America’s, and by moon pose, I mean I’m taking
the form of a devoted circle to watch footage of Hailey Bieber, wife of
Justin Bieber, at the Met Gala talking to Emma Chamberlain. Hailey
enters the shot with levity and is like ‘Hello my angel!’ Emma’s eyes
move over Hailey, and she’s like ‘Tell me about this, it’s so beautiful.’
‘We just decided to do this very beautiful kind of white, effortless mo-
ment,’ says Hailey, ‘and by the way, I saw your look a few hours ago and
I’m obsessed’. ‘Stop…’ says Emma, ‘I gasped… I gasped’ says Hailey.
The camera cuts to a wider view, making it clear Emma has arrived
entirely in white too. She is wearing ivory and cream Louis Vuitton,
with the addition of a vintage Cartier diamond tiara placed on her crop
of platinum blonde hair. This is the same Cartier tiara in the video
titled ‘24 hours with Emma Chamberlain, preparing for the Met Gala’
streamed by Vogue’s official YouTube channel. During this ten-minute
clip, Emma explains her exhaustion after flying in from LA yesterday,
her moon-shade eyes bluing out, reminding me of her historical self,
which in its multitudes, includes another video offering 11.9 million
subscribers a time-lapse of her crouched on the floor of a five-star
Beverly Hills hotel room. She was eating a cracker delivered by room
service while vlogging on the brink of tears saying, ‘lonely’. However,
at this Met Gala, Emma holds the mic to her mouth and is like ‘So it’s
kind of like a girl’s night out tonight’ and Hailey is like ‘One hundred
percent… The girls are Girling.’
I pause the video. The light from the screen dims in degrees as several
minutes pass and an unsettled feeling keeps my body facing front
and centre. Closing the laptop, I begin to move around the living
room, in search of the steps it will take before I return to my own
sense of Girling. The type of Girling where you could say my body is
no longer being reclaimed by the body, by its job, reclaimed by sand
even. However, it seems the way I need to start Girling (proper) is to
prepare a glass of lukewarm Solpadeine for the contractions of a new
headache, and I’m thinking: Girling. It’s like the word duckling. The
diminutive ‘ling’ making ‘girl’ smaller. A Girling could be something
like a Girlette, or in order of descending size: Women > Girl > Girling.
But it seems Hailey was saying Girling as if to amplify her very own
verb: to girl. Would it be so out of the question then to assume Hailey
is taking custody of ‘girl’? Girling forth so to speak, Girling forth in a
white effortless moment.
As my headache subsides, and the kitchen air becomes less heavy with
light, I make a wish on an eyelash: Girling will remain a mere phase
between agent and action, remain half-understood. Like something
as perfectly representative yet active as the hidden metrics and breath
of a girl-tree openly showing her leaves as signs of some proximity to
a mammal.
In turn, I receive this mantra as an outcome:
I wish my Girling to be mammalian I wish my Girling a microphone.
I wish my Girling to be mammalian I wish my Girling a microphone.
(…)
‘In her astounding debut, Eve Esfandiari-Denney reports on the gerunds of a girl’s life: working, talking, listening, flowering, looking, seeing, pretending, embodying, doubling, selling yourself, losing yourself, “literally flowing through the solar system,” witnessing, shining, “holding the possibility for being prolonged, continued and remade,” levitating, swirling, healing, losing, opening, breathing in, breathing out, translating, yearning, crushing, dying. The speaker, a wise but humble narrator, charming and willing, takes us along as she “piece[s] together the delicate parts of what I am.” Pop culture references are deployed with power and she plays with philosophical questions like they are toys. Girling absolutely stopped me in my tracks. You lean in to get the full story and all of sudden you’ve been brought to your knees. Only a girl would write, of the cancer devastating her family, that, “the disease is just / trying to survive, / too.” Girling is a biodome for girls who think too hard. “I thought I’d discover transcendental things, but inside me was a tanning salon.” Yes, girl, same. Put it on my tombstone.’
— Sasha Debevec-McKenney, author of Joy is my Middle Name
‘Eve Esfandiari-Denney brilliantly reconstructs the feeling and language of personhood at its precarious, mortal edges. Transcendental, humane, cool and extraterrestrial, slant-smart and errantly metaphysical, Girling explores the de-familiar world, woozy from the fumes of its crash landing. This is the most enigmatic debut I have read in a decade, and it won’t rest on my shelf for another, at least’
— Jack Underwood, author of A Year in the New Life
‘Girling glides through death, pain, surprise and survival to arrive at the most gorgeous and hopeful principle for living. The sensation of not-knowing, or of being suspended in-between, becomes an opportunity to be more permeable, more open to the synchronicities and oddities of the world. This collection is mesmeric, elemental, luminous, but time spent with Eve’s writing also feels like the most intimate and generative conversations, the moments between friends that can alter the day’s shape.’
— Brodie Crellin, author of A Sense of Occasion
Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s debut poetry pamphlet, My Bodies This Morning This Evening, was published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. She has been shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize, Aesthetica’s Creative Writing Award, the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (Performed) and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Granta, BBC Radio 4 and Prototypes Annual Anthology, among others. Girling is her first collection.
